Australia is about to become home to American bases, and potentially a nuclear target, and this seems to have escaped the attention of the Opposition and the media. (more…)
Mike Scrafton
-
AUSMIN and AUKUS: It’s even worse than you think
Nothing exemplifies the loss of national sovereignty, and the abandonment of strategic autonomy, like handing the war decision over to the US. The submarine issue is simply a blind. AUKUS just a distraction.
-
Mike Scrafton: Nuclear-powered submarines are just bad defence policy
Australian governments are now certain to be bedevilled by submarines for generations. (more…)
-
Obsessing over confrontation with China leads to arid policy grounds
Shaping Australia’s China policy is complex enough without chasing impractical outcomes. Peter Hartcher and Geoffrey Barker are concerned about the threat from China but pursuing a confrontational strategy has shortcomings. (more…)
-
Afghanistan is a warning for all US allies
As an ally of the US Australia should be reflecting deeply on America’s third major postwar strategic fiasco. The US military has brought overwhelming military power and technological sophistication to major defeats in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. In each, the allies have been let down or suffered. (more…)
-
ASPI outsourcing our defence policy to the gun runners!
Australia’s strategic policy discourse takes place in a fog of claims about risk and the warning time, while the key issues are the balance and trajectory of military forces in the Asia Pacific and the strategic interests of the regional states. Recent exhortations to urgent actions and radical defence reforms are alarmist and confused, and are being used to promote the outsourcing defence policy. (more…)
-
ASPI, AZERIs, the ADF, and the Defence hierarchy
ASPI’s Michael Shoebridge’s criticism of the professionalism and competency of the Defence hierarchy is serious. He paints the military and civilian hierarchy in Defence as hidebound, and infers they are placing service personnel and the nation’s security at risk. His analysis, however, displays a surprising degree of unfamiliarity with military affairs, and does not support his grave assertion. (more…)
-
The ‘enemy within the gates’-the key to American politics
It is not at all clear how much more stress, how many more incendiary inputs into its inflammable politics, the American Republic can stand before it becomes fully dysfunctional and unworkable. (more…)
-
Australia’s strategic conundrum-Is America declining?
Jon Stanford and Hans Ohff criticise the ADF for “[P]lanning for the last war rather than the next”. Yet, their plan returns to a simplistic defence of Australia scenario from the 1980s. Nevertheless, their recent piece in ASPI’s Strategist blog (republished in P&I) provides an entrée to the related conundrums facing Australia’s strategic policy; the decline of US power and the circumstances under which Australia might come under direct threat. (more…)
-
Biden’s hopes fall short in G7 communique
The results of the G7 summit in Cornwall have received considerable criticism. For many, it was simply a staged production involving smoke and mirrors. Behind the thoroughly estimable objectives littered throughout the communique can be seen the inherent weakness of the G7 grouping. Once mighty, now best at papering over its growing irrelevance. (more…)
-
Behaviour, the pandemic, and climate change
Implementation of carbon reduction and other global warming-related policies will be an inordinately difficult challenge. The inability of governments to effect widespread, sustained behavioural change has been an outstanding feature of the past eighteen months of the pandemic. In preparation for the transition to a zero-carbon, climate-adapted future, the past assumptions underlying policy implementation need to be urgently reassessed. (more…)
-
Not the war over Taiwan again!
The lack of high-quality strategic analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has been frequently highlighted in P&I. Nonetheless, ASPI’s dangerously inadequate analysis should be regularly confronted. (more…)
-
Once was a hegemon: Australia and the decline of the US
Australia’s Indo-Pacific obsession hides a radical global geopolitical shift. Australian policymakers will persist in making poor choices unless they accept that the US hegemony has passed a tipping point, and America has already become just one great power among others.
-
Warriors, war and Mike Pezzullo’s ANZAC Day message
If Mike Pezzullo, Secretary of Home Affairs, were to move to the top Defence job his views on war become of crucial public interest. The government’s reaction to his message to staff on ANZAC Day emphasises this point. (more…)
-
Capitalism, COVID, and Climate
The pandemic alliance between Big Pharma and governments foreshadows how the market-based capitalist system will fail to address global warming. Just finding low emissions technology is not an answer.
-
Democracy militant: strategic autonomy and Europe’s lessons for Australia
The Biden Administration’s China policy assumes that among democratic nations there is a shared view on an existential competition with China. The re-emergence of the issue of European strategic autonomy highlights President Biden’s misunderstanding. Rather than again uncritically fall in behind America’s foreign and strategic policies, Australia needs to pay heed to Europe’s mature approach to sovereignty and autonomy. (more…)
-
A Minneapolis community and systematic racism
While I think would be a conceit for outsiders to imagine the lives of the residents of George Floyd’s neighbourhood, the trial in Minneapolis does however provide a limited glimpse of a lived experience which, other than for many indigenous citizens, is alien to most Australians. (more…)
-
Shifting national interests put Biden’s alliance strategy in doubt
The Biden Administration’s approach to China is anchored in the strength America draws from its alliances. The President and the Secretaries of State and Defense have made this clear. This is an anachronistic basis on which to construct a strategic policy given today’s strategic realities.
-
Radical people, not technology, are needed for a sustainable revolution
Michael Keating’s summary and review of Ross Garnaut’s latest book Reset: Restoring Australia after the Pandemic Recession is stimulating and important. While massive sustainable transformations in Australia’s economy and society are required, the emphasis on macroeconomic policies and the faith shown in technology is concerning.
-
The persistence of American authoritarianism should worry Australia
America has become less comprehensible and predictable to outside observers. The scale of the support for ex-President Trump’s election fraud claims, the assault on the Capitol, and the failure to convict Trump in the Senate, all seem to be portents of an emerging illiberal authoritarianism.
The illiberal forces are barely restrained. Australian policymakers must already have reached the point of asking “what if?” and be thinking about possible policy realignments. At a minimum, the task of imagining a post-alliance future must begin. Complacency is not a strategy. (more…)
-
Competition for technological primacy between the great powers will draw in ASEAN
Scott Morrison assumes the ASEAN states will line up with the US and Australia in attempting to blunt China’s growth and influence. Yet China can offer the ASEAN states solutions to their pressing problems of population growth, poverty and urbanisation through its ‘smart cities’ technologies.
(more…) -
Taiwan: a ‘wicked’ strategic problem for Australia
ASPI’s executive director Peter Jennings is banging the war drums over Taiwan again. He would have Australia automatically marching into a war in defence of the island. Why would Australia go to war over Taiwan? (more…)
-
Is Trump’s 1776 Commission report an extremist manifesto?
The 1776 Commission Report released on 18 January 2021 is a time bomb of extremist propaganda; a source document for the arguments and recruitment of white nationalists and white supremacists, and for the apologists of radical libertarianism. (more…)
-
What should Australia want from a Biden National Security Strategy? Avoiding war in Asia
Australia should hope for a major shift away from President Trump’s strategy but not an uncritical return to President Obama’s 2015 version. For a start a new NSS should reposition the US as a less crusading nation, one more accepting of difference (more…)
-
Preparing for a 3°C warmer future: the ideological shift and institutional response Australia will need.
Three things are obvious. The collective emission reduction efforts of nations will not avoid 3oC global warming by the century’s end. Therefore, national adaptation actions will need prepare for the worse than expected scale and impact from the effects of climate change. As a result, earlier ideological assumptions about governments will have to give way to policies that are interventionist and systemic. (more…)
-
The deceit of deterrence; a bankrupt strategic justification for defence expenditure
Although references to deterrence are regularly trotted out to justify defence acquisition decisions and alliance policy, the place of the idea of deterrence in Australia’s strategic policy is opaque and poorly understood. That the effectiveness of a deterrence strategy is highly dependent on contingent circumstances is regularly left unaddressed by advocates of ever greater defence spending. (more…)
-
China-Australia relations: it’s not as simple as ABC
There are many commentators with strong and legitimate concerns about China. The relationship between Australia and China is a very important one and it warrants open and vigorous debate (more…)
-
ASPI resorts to bullying to deter strategic debate on China
Peter Jennings, Executive Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), has launched an ad hominem attack belittling those who take a contrary approach to Australia-China relations rather than advocating for war preparations. But it is his poor grasp of his subject matter that is most disappointing.
-
ASPI’s guide to submarines leaves the biggest strategic questions unanswered
The interested reader would see much of this report as a public relations exercise, talking down to the public, and attempting to divert questions away from the burning one. Is this submarine intended primarily as a contribution by Australia to a possible conflict in the South China Sea? If it is, the Minister and the submarine cheer squad should tell the public. The, by now, sceptical interested reader might conclude that this diversionary effort is in itself an inadvertent admission. (more…)